Between Suffering, Silence and Denial : The Nazi Past in the German-Canadian Press

Abstract : The Germans of Canada who arrived during the 1950s and 60s carried the weight of Nazism upon their shoulders – regardless of what their position might have been during that period. Even so far from Germany, they had to come to terms with the German past, and to deal with individual or collective suffering, in an immigration context where the discussion about the nature of the Third Reich (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) could not easily take place. Many chose silence, but victimisation also marked the German-Canadian discourse, especially because a large number of German immigrants were people who had been expelled from the “eastern territories” after 1945. The insistence upon the status of victim was persistent in the German-Canadian press, that evolved on the margins of the debates that raged in West-German society, and that hardly encouraged its readership to think through the notion of their own moral responsibility regarding Nazism. Some of the readers not only desired to begin anew after the Nazi catastrophe, but also wanted to minimise Auschwitz and put it on the same level as the Vertreibung (Expulsion). This strategy, that sometimes ended in open anti-Semitism or Holocaust denial, can be seen in the letters to the editors of the Kanada Kurier, a weekly (1889-2004) that constantly stressed that collective pain of “Vertriebene” (Expelled) had hardly yet been heard, and gave a voice to those who therefore were less than interested in thinking through German history in terms of the sufferance that Germans have inflicted.